This year has been pretty okay. Not only is it my last year in high school, but it's also my last year of Game Design. In the beginning, I had a pretty basic grasp of the industry and the things that went into it, but I didn't really know much about the various careers associated with it, or the legal aspects tied to said careers. This all changed over the first quarter because of the units associated with both topics, and through those I learned a lot. The lesson that had the biggest impact on me as a game design student was the personal project unit. This is because it was entirely unstructured and left it up to you to utilize your skills and bring them together to create your own game. I liked this unit a lot because I feel it's indicative of working in not only the games industry, but industries such as graphic design and video editing. As much as I learned from the career practices unit, if I had to pick one to be removed from the course as a whole, that's the one I would choose. I feel like getting right into coding, modeling, and Unity would be extremely beneficial, especially for students (like me) who hadn't actually done any over the summer so they could get their muscle memory back on those programs, instead of letting their knowledge of them deteriorate with time. In order to better prepare students for a future in the game industry, the course can be improved in stressing the independent project more, and maybe even making it something that's started much earlier in the year. Having something big like that to work towards does something to a student's motivation, and as mentioned earlier it gives them experience with working with deadlines in the industry. Since I'm not going to be here for Advanced Studies, this year has helped me prepare mostly for college. From my "reliable" sources, I've been told that college is similar to how things work in here, more or less. You're given an assignment, as well as a deadline, and you're basically told to go wild. There's none of the hand-holding that's been so prevalent throughout high school. Instead, everything is left up to you. If you get something done great, and if you don't, oh well. Also, the fact that there's no powerlunch associated with this class helps to drive this point further. You don't really have anyone else to blame but yourself (and Unity) for the grade that you get in the class, which I think goes a long way in preparing students for the real world. Course Map for the Year
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I think I've narrowed down what kind of game I'm going to make for the final project. I think that I'll make a simple 3d endless runner similar to Temple Run, where the goal is to survive as long as possible and collect points while avoiding obstacles. I haven't decided on a particular theme or aesthetic yet, but I might do something futuristic, with the player character running across rooftops of an endless city, avoiding robots and other hazards. Due to my limited coding experience, I doubt that the game will end up being that complicated or have much variation in mechanics and scenery, but it'll probably still be of the same quality of something thrown onto the app store by a tiny one-person team. Tons of best sellers on the app store are exactly that, after all, so if I manage to finish the game, there's always the possibility of making it free to play with a ton of ads and putting it up there for anyone to download.
Some Potentially Useful Videos: Endless runner tutorial playlist Making infinite terrain Additional tutorial I can already tell that making my own game from scratch is going to be a pain. Even when I completely follow the tutorials, there's no guarantee that everything will actually work properly (as demonstrated by the space shooter and tank games not working even when I try and use the completed files), so I'm not sure how good my 3d game will actually be. If I actually manage to finish it, the game will probably be something extremely simple like 3d pac-man or q-bert or something similar, because anything more complicated than that is way beyond my abilities. I'm going to have to try and finish the rest of the tutorials at home, and hope that everything actually works on my computer even though it hasn't been on the school ones. Maybe there's some update that I don't know about that's preventing everything from working properly. I'll have to figure that out when I get to it.
Useful things UI Text Invisible Objects Rigidbody Help Working with Unity is a lot easier than I thought it would be. The coding part isn't even that difficult anymore thanks to the tutorials, and the only problems come from the version of unity that I'm using being different from the version used in the tutorials. At this rate I'd still say that there's only a 50% chance of me actually getting to the creating my own game, and an even smaller chance of that game actually being functional. Following along with tutorials is fine, but making something from scratch is a different thing entirely. This isn't like graphic design or writing where I would be totally comfortable with doing that, but I'll still try and get to that point regardless. Not having set deadlines for the assignments is probably the best thing to happen to me all year in this class. Now even if I have technical issues that prevent me from turning something in, I actually have time now to sort them out.
Useful Unity Things: How to use getcomponent Rigidbody properties for 2D UI Text Surprisingly, Unity is a lot easier to use than I remember it being. Maybe it's because of the new update, or maybe I was a lot better at using it than I remember, but it was surprisingly simple to just jump right back into it from where I left off almost half a year ago. Even coding, which I thought would be a massive pain, was really simple when I figured out how to use the GetComponent command for depreciated items. Something that I've found really helpful is that C Sharp seems to automatically map your movement buttons to WASD and the arrow keys without you having to manually set that up yourself, which I remember being difficult when I first tried to do it. There's always the possibility of course, that the feature was always in the program and I'm just remembering it wrong, which now that I think about it, is probably the case. The hardest thing for me right now would probably be trying to get my game physics to work properly, which is surprisingly a lot harder than it sounds. The tutorials have been really helpful when it comes to getting the basics back down, and I actually feel somewhat confident that I'll be able to make my own game after I complete all of them. The game isn't going to be overly complex of course, the last group project proved that doing something like that is beyond my capabilities as of right now, but at least it'll be functional. Hopefully. Maybe.
Some Useful Tutorials That Helped Me Out: C Sharp Coding MORE C Sharp Coding Because I Needed It Some New Features In Unity That Will Probably Be Useful At Some Point Ok, so I haven't used 3dsmax since god knows when, and coming back to it in the beginning of the third quarter was a nightmare for a few minutes until I started remembering what things actually do. I'm not that good at 3d modeling or modeling in general but rigging and animating is easy enough (when it doesn't crash). I only really needed to look at one tutorial video to get back into the swing of things. After becoming reacquainted with the program, I've really come to appreciate how much of a help the different perspective modes are when trying to apply bones to something, and figuring out that I can activate a layers panel like in Photoshop also made the program a lot easier to use than I remember. Adobe Fuse makes creating characters to model incredibly simple, even if the clothes you can add to your created characters makes it more difficult to properly rig the bones. Things started out pretty easy, but I know that it's pretty much guaranteed to get more difficult with each assignment. That's how it always is when it comes to 3dsmax.
On another note, Adobe Fuse is pretty interesting. It seems that they keep pumping out more and more experimental software, but since this one helps with modeling I can't really complain too much. I'm especially impressed with the level of customization on offer there, and it kind of reminds me of some of the best elements of character creation menus from different video games. You can make something either completely normal or a complete abomination thanks to all of the settings you can change. I tended to stick to something more normal, as trying to rig someone with giant hands, feet, and other odd proportions is a lot more time consuming than it's actually worth. Videos that helped me get back into 3dsmax: Rigging a character Animating Exporting an animaton I've found the video editing assignments to be really easy, mostly because they're the same ones that I did in freshman year. The story video, which would've taken me a week and a half three years ago, now only takes me a few hours to complete. I've learned a lot in the past three years, not just about Premiere Pro and how it works, but also about editing. Doing most of the editing for the Blackspace documentary last summer taught me a lot when it comes to editing a professional project, and I've gotten some additional experience from the various assignment videos that I've had to make for various classes. Even though my main interest is in writing, I still recognize how invaluable having editing and cinematic experience is, especially for something like self-promotion and marketing. Instead of paying someone to put together a promo video for me, I can just make one on my own, and alternatively if I really wanted to, I could charge people to do that for them once I get a video portfolio together. I think the biggest roadblock for me at the moment is technical difficulties. Things not sending, files corrupting etc.
This channel really taught me a lot when it comes to editing and cinematography: https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting One of the first videos that taught me how to use Premiere Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzO3vrFaPRU I'm honestly pretty glad to be doing audio assignments again. Audio is something that I think I'm really good at, and I relish any excuse to open Adobe Audition. I'm able to fly through the assignments because of all of the past experience I have, and because I have Audition at home. I'm really looking forward to the next unit where we get to work with video and audio, and the assignment where we make a trailer is something that's right up my alley. The audio book assignment is something that I'm having fun with to. I've been planning to make an audio book for my short story since the beginning, and the assignment gives me an excuse to test it out with one page. Making sound effects for it is a lot of fun as well, even though I had to download a screaming cat sound in the end. I've done so much audio work that it's become connected with my video and writing work as well. I'm always considering audio timing and music when I'm doing any kind of artistic thing, mostly because I listen to a lot of music, and have been inspired by movies and TV shows that use music and sound extremely effectively.
Summary: Audio is really easy for me because I've been doing it for so long, and it's become very interconnected with everything I do. Things helped me out early on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sjZJ9i_mH0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq6EYcpWB_c (This is the series that got me interested in audio and how to use music in a scene) Compared to last year, working in a small group has been a lot easier. This is partially because I'm not the production manager and can focus on what I know I'm good at and not what other people think I'm good at, but also because my group members are a lot easier to work and communicate with this time around. One of the biggest challenges for being the narrative lead is having to constantly ask your other team members what you should put on the written documents, especially if the game you're writing documents for is their idea. This challenge is alleviated somewhat by having responsive team members that know what they want in their game. This makes my job a lot easier since I don't have to guess and assume and try and come up with things on the spot. My only concern doesn't even come from my narrative role, but rather my audio role. I'm concerned that I may not have enough time to find or create audio assets and at the same time put them in the game. I guess that would just depend on how fast we're able to get to the coding stage.
If we could switch from unity to UE4, I'd choose UE4 mainly for the blueprint option. Being able to quickly have the program code for you sounds like a godsend, especially since you could always go back and alter the code later, and since computers are less prone to making the simple mistakes that one would inevitably end up making while trying to code. Unity is nice, but the coding can get pretty frustrating pretty fast and an alternative would be very welcome.
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